Continued fraction representation of the Fermi-Dirac function for large-scale electronic structure calculations

Abstract

An efficient and accurate contour integration method is presented for large-scale electronic structure calculations based on the Green function. By introducing a continued fraction representation of the Fermi-Dirac function derived from a hypergeometric function, the Matsubara summation is generalized with respect to distribution of poles so that the integration of the Green function can converge rapidly. Numerical illustrations, evaluation of the density matrix for a simple model Green function and a total energy calculation for aluminum bulk within density functional theory, clearly show that the method provides remarkable convergence with a small number of poles, indicating that the method can be applied to not only the electronic structure calculations, but also a wide variety of problems.